Archive for January, 2009

The "regular boy"

Finally.  And not a moment too soon, I might add, I got one hell of a haircut!  I HATED my hair.  It was constantly falling into my eyes,  took forever to “do”, and always looked like shit no matter how long I worked on it.

The way it is now is how it used to be when I spent more time trying to keep myself looking decent and took the time to escape and get my hair cut from time to time.  To say I am a “low maintainence” gal is an understatement of biblical proportion.  However, I feel so much better about myself, my family and life in general now that I can’t possibly justify letting myself get in that condition again.  I made an appointment to get it cut again in 5 weeks before I left he salon.

Even John, who likes it to be “just a bit longer” than it is now, and used to tease me when I got this cut and tell me to go to the barber shop with him and ask for a “regular boy’s”, cause it’d be much cheaper,  had told me that I needed to go get a haircut.

Yes,THAT bad.

Ideally, I would want to look like the chick on Dirty Sexy Money that is the wife to the main character.  I don’t even know what her name is and this is me, too lazy to do my internet homework and find out for you.

BUT, it IS me and I won’t let you down completely.  Here is a picture of her and her on screen husband.  He looks , like crap, I don’t know why, but, she is adorable as ever.  If anyone can get away with a really, really short haircut, it’s her.  (If ONLY I were that skinny and adorable!)

So here it is… a quick shot I took of myself in my bathroom, no less.   No matter what anyone thinks of it, this hair is so much more workable than the previous mop as far as the person underneath it goes, there is no comparison.

Picture purge

Hello intertubes!  I don’t have TOO terribly much to say, and it’s probably a good thing as I’m pretty much all typed talked out.

There are these nagging pics on my camera that I took and want to keep, but am not really sure why and they are a bit…leftoverish.

DISCLAIMER:

You will now be subjected to them.

John, New Year’s Eve at our friend’s house with a blanket wrapped around him cause he was freezing to death as he didn’t wear a jacket like his smart, intelligent, always right wife told him to.  It looks a bit grainy, I guess cause I took it on ISO with and he is illuminated by distant fireworks/streetlamp.  Oh hell, I dunno.  This new camera is still a bit of a mystery to me.


My guilty secret, hidden in my freezer.  No, not the bottle of vodka.  Next to it.  The bag of minty good Three Musketeers bite size wonders.   My reason for living through Christmas.

John is such a BIG boy!  He concentrates carefully on getting two cups of coffee back to us at, yet another date at La Madeleine’s.  Maybe next time we could dress up a little for our date?

More evidence of our lunch date while playing with my new camera and trying to see how clear I could get a close up shot.   Well, we can clearly see that the table needs re-varnishing and a cup of coffee is $2.00! Ridiculous.

This just makes me laugh.  Tell me the truth.  If this didn’t have “Media Mail” stamped all over it, wouldn’t it look just like one of those packages of cocaine, or weed you see on TV that the cops are always finding in door panels of cars coming over the border?  I left it sitting in the car seat while we were eating breakfast at afore mentioned restaurant and half expected to see a cop peering in at it when we came out.

Just to prove what a good, kind, loving, adequate pet owner I am I have given our ancient cat her own heat lamp.  It shines on nothing but her 13 year old body.  She loves me best.

Gratuitous cat pic.  Again, I love that ISO setting!  She looks as if she’s deciding between a nap and a long hot bath with one of those books… Oh, wait a minute, that was me.

Her other favorite place to hang out.  As long as there’s a jacket or something to curl up in…

I’ve been trying to get a good shot of the wall treatment I recently finished in my bathroom.  The wall paper was HORRIBLE, straight out of the mid ’80′s.  I took some drywall compound and textured right over it with a wide putty knife and then, when it dried, (just a few hours), I held up a stencil of a fleur di lis and swiped more compound over it.  Then, just lifting the stencil off leaves a raised fleur di lis.

After that Mither came to visit and we painted it light lavender and finished it off with a dark purple glaze for that aged look I don’t want on my face but, for some reason, think is good on the walls.  Oh and then I silver leafed the fleur di lis.  AND if all that fleur di lis stuff wasn’t enough pretentious French talk, I then said, “VOILA!”

Here’s a close up of a…fleur.  heh

And here is my guilty secret.  The strip of wall paper that I didn’t get done, below the mirrored cabinet and above the backsplash.  I didn’t notice it until I sat down on the… well, you know… where you sit when you go into a bathroom…  I don’t go in there much as it’s the guest bath.  Anyway, the wallpaper looks like someone got drunk and threw up many, many different colors of paint all over the walls.  It was BAD.  I sat down on that same, er, receptacle to take the pic and you can se the top of my head in the mirror.

OK, where I was just sitting to take that last shot.

HEY, MY PANTS WERE UP!

There's a thief amongst us.

Hello people!  Well, Nana and Pop have gone home and should actually be there shortly.  We had all kinds of fun during the short amount of time they were here.

We also did some sleuthing!

Now I bet you are all wondering what happened with Henrietta’s aide/thief that we suspect swiped the $100 out of my purse.  Well, we set up the camera that Lisa had loaned me that is motion activated.   Got it all set up on top of the fridge and John and Pop left and then Mither announced, (loudly), that we needed to run over to Lisa’s house to see what was going on with her.  So I told the aide and H that we’d be back later and we left.

John got home first and found the camera lying on it’s back on top of the extremely tall refrigerator.  It was lying in a manner that it was incapable of “falling” into.   It was incapable of falling in the first place.  He took the card out and he and Keelan were looking at the pictures when we got home.  There are a lot of them simply because it snapped one every time the light went on or off or anyone left or came in, but here are a few showing what happened and in the order it happened.

Here is John leaving.  My purse is on the counter on the right.  You can see the top of the faucet in the sink in the wet bar.  My purse is the blob to the left of it.  Right beneath the “10″.

Here is Mither leaving and I am right behind her.  I guess the light was on in the kitchen since the wall is now green, (as it really is), and it looks turquoise in the first one…

And here is the last one it took.  You can see the fingers and the double exposure from the movement.  It happened 8 minutes after we left.  Undoubtedly she saw the camera on top of the fridge and turned it over.  I hadn’t left any cash or credit cards in my purse but she didn’t know that until she looked.  Henrietta said that she stood “behind the counter” to watch the soap opera with her and she didn’t know why she didn’t sit down like she usually did. She said she kept going and looking out the window and then going back to stand at the counter.  The widow is to the left outside the frame of the picture.

I do.

Henrietta doesn’t know that we suspect the aide of anything.  She doesn’t know about the missing money, or the camera or any of it.  She has such a negative view of the world and all it’s inhabitants anyway, we all just think it’s better that she not feel like she was duped.  The sad part is that she really likes this aide a lot.  They spoke Spanish to each other and H was thrilled with this as her Spanish was really rusty and getting to be more and more of a second language all the time.  She did an excellent job with her and they really got along well.

I will just tell her that the company had to send her to another area or something and she has to have a new aide.  Oh, I don’t know.. I’ll have to think it through.  I have to have a better story than that, I guess…

John asked H where the aide was and where all she went while we were gone and then I did too, separately. and she then got the idea that something was wrong and when she asked if something was missing and I lied and said, “No.”, she got a bit defensive for her.  She told me that she was a good person and there was no reason to “look into her”.   I feel really bad, but I have enough to go on and I called the company and told them not to send her back and that I wasn’t accusing her of anything, (after all I don’t have any hard evidence), but that I didn’t want her back because I couldn’t risk trusting her.  I asked to talk to the owner but she was out of town for a “few days” so I told the lady what had happened and she was nice, but I can tell there was no way they could afford to lose any employees so I feel sure they won’t fire her even if they have reports of this kind of thing happening before.

I hope to talk to the owner when she gets back in town.

This post will be quite short for a variety of reasons:

The last one was uncharacteristically long.  More than, probably anyone wanted to hear from me.   I was full of angst. (That’s my excuse, in case you didn’t know.)

Mither and Pop are coming to see me and they are on their way here RIGHT NOW.  I gots to get this dump cleaned up!  Change the sheets on their bed!  Start a grocery list for supper tonight!  Clean the bathtub!  Finish the laundry!  Locate all obscene graffiti written in the dust on my furniture and add or subtract letters to make it more grandparent friendly.

FIND MY DAMN GLASSES.  They are gone, people!  I have looked everywhere!  Remember, I just got them a short while back and I cannot function for very long without having to actually READ something.  I took them off when John got home yesterday and they have been gone ever since.  I cannot remember where I was!

Oh crap!  I gotta get going!  Before I do I will share with you that I have a new look coming for HalfAsstic and am excited about it.  Cam is working on it as I type.  Well, actually, that’s not true as he’s in Italy and is seven hours ahead of us, (he’s asleep), but he’s already done some things that I really like.

Anyway, stay tuned!

Free Toes, everybody!

Well, people this just sucks.  No.  Not the poop of yesterday.  It is still here today and has happened twice so far.  H clearly has a stomach bug of some sort.  Bless her heart, no one else in the family has had one but, being so old she is more susceptible to catching things, I guess.

But that is not what I was talking about sucking.  No.  There is a thief amongst us.  It could be your neighbor, friend or YOU.  Well, OK, so maybe none of that is even remotely close to likely.  STILL!

Yesterday when I was in here, in the boudoir, hacking out carefully constructing the poop post for yesterday, Kes came in and told me that the next day, (today), she was going to go up to U of H and purchase a text book that she has to have for school.  Those dirty bastards are requiring her to buy a $250.00 book with some sort of electronic gizmo that has to go with it, that you can only get at UH. Her dad and I had discussed it and we were going to help her with that book so I gave her a little stash of cash that had been lying on the desk for a few days waiting to go to the bank.  It was $190.00 even.  A hundred bill on the outside, four $20.00′s and a $10.00 on the inside.  She said no, she would pay for it, she knew we were having a hard enough time with bills and why not spend the money she has been saving for her education now while we are strapped, blah, blah, blah.  She was being very sweet and understanding and trying to pick up some responsibility.  But I insisted and pushed it on her and she took it eventually and went her way.

Today she came and found me and asked me if I had taken money out of my purse.  I said,…. no?  And she raced away looking for her sister.  She came back in a bit of a panic and said that she doesn’t know what happened to the $100.00 dollar bill in my purse.  I must have looked a bit blank and told her I don’t have a $100 in my purse.  She explained that yesterday when she left my room she just walked straight in and put the $190.00 in my purse in my little coin purse thing where I keep my cash and cards and zipped it up and dropped back in the middle section where I always keep it.

Today she was looking for change for a $100 dollar bill of hers and remembered the money in my purse she had put there last night.  Nobody knew about it but her at this point. So she looked in there to see if she could scare up another $10.00 to make an even 100 out of the smaller bills and the $100. bill was missing from the outside of the folded cash.  She called her dad at work and asked him if he had gotten it out of my purse this morning and he said, no, he knew nothing about it.

Oh crap.

There was a complete scouring of the area and searching on hands and knees and looking so far deep down into my purse I found traces of Jimmy Hoffa.  Every single item came out and was examined closely to see if it had ever even tried to look like a $100.

Next she went and looked for her sister and was frantically asking about the missing money.

Keelan was clueless as well and responded with something like, “Money?  In Mom’s purse? No, I didn’t even know Mom had money in her purse…”  Neither one one of them have ever even thought of taking money from us without asking and so that wasn’t really a valid way to go, but Kes was trying to exhaust all avenues because the money had to be somewhere.

About this time we started backtracking who all had been here between last night and this afternoon.  I mean it’s the only place left to “look” cause, people we have seen things in this house now that make YOUR dustbunnies look like pansy assed wimps.

The small group of friends Keelan had come over with her just popped their heads in to say hello over from the foyer.  They never even came through the living room and went to the other side of the wet bar, where I stash my purse so it’s easy to grab on the way out the back door.

HOWEVER, this is Friday and the Caregiver Provider Aide was here from 11:00am to 2:00pm.  About noon I went in and ran a nice hot bath for myself like I always do when she comes and John is not able to be off work.  So she knew I was in the bath and my purse is there sitting on the wet bar right by the door where she goes to put the dirty linens in with the laundry.  H is turned in her chair with her back to that general area and there is no one else in the house.

My first thought was why would she wait and do this when I am home with them instead of when I am gone with John when he is off?  And then I heard that little intelligent voice I rarely hear from say,  “Because my purse is gone with me then.”  And the dumb ass in me replied, “Oh.”

So now, we are starving to death and don’t have the money required to pay attention, we are trying to figure out what to do next.  I consult with my dear Mither and Pop and then, of course, Lisa is called into the loop.  Kessa’s  boyfriend suggested we get a camera and set her up and record it.  I feel it would cost much more than the lost $100. to buy the equipment for that and she is here for three hours, so it would have to be a motion sensor kind that would come on when she walks in front of it.  I guess?

Well, I was telling Lisa about this and she said that they have a camera that does that.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I asked, Why? And she said that they put them up on deer trails and what not in Colorado on their vacation property and see all kinds of wildlife.

Whatever.  How cool is this?  I swear if I catch her, (and I will cause I am stealthy like that), I will show you guys the video footage.

After I get finished beating her to death with H’s bedpan.